Evaluation

well heres my evaluation, all i need to do now, is organise all my assets etc.


Evaluation- Steve

From the very beginning of this Final Major Project, at around the time of the briefing, I had a vision. I imagined an animated short to be made by some or all of the people who do a lot of animation and 3d. I thought perhaps if we brought all our talents together, as we have individual skills in 3d and animation, it would be great to combine these skills. I went to the back of the studio and discussed this with Kirill Nagornych and Chris Meredith. Just the thought of me, Chris and Kirill making a single short film has great potential. At least this is the thing that I had decided to do for the last project, again I can combine my skills and on the way learn some new skills, which is always very useful as depending on the scenario that surrounds the plot. Certain short films might require certain special effects whilst others are just relying on the animation of a character. However as we were a potential group of 3, Chris decided to work independently on something that he was wanting to learn, which was more in the special effects area etc. Chris was explaining, that for this it was probably not quite enough time for the scale of the idea, it was decided however it would be good for the 3rd year. As I was still seeing my self as a film maker/ animator I still wanted to produce some kind of short animated film, with a good story as well. So myself and Kirill, was still up for the idea of making an animated short, all we had to do was to design a story for it etc. So over the Easter break Kirill and myself exchanged emails, we read each others bloggs and from there we developed a few ideas. I posted some short animated films that I had found on the very acclaimed ‘dailymotion.com’ and from these both me and Kirill noticed how different films had different ways of conveying a mood, and it would be good if ours could do just that. The other thing that I noticed, is duration, some short films would last for 10 minutes, and some for 2 minutes. Our story that we decided on, originally was sparked of interest from Kirill. He sent me emails of his bizarre awareness of plastic bags that have been stranded in trees and bushes and the thing that to him, is strange and the fact that he has not seen this in any other country. It seems that people just don’t seem to be bothered by the litter and plastic in the trees etc. After he had told me this observation, I also thought it was a bit weird, because recently I have been wondering a similar thing. So all in all, a film about a plastic bag was to be made.
From experience of the last brief that I had worked on, I had decided, now we have the theme, it was best to think of a good story and plot almost straight away and ahead of the time. We didn’t need to waste time re-writing a story/ plot, which we could be animating or editing, which takes a lot of valuable time. As we returned from the Easter break, Kirill and myself went into the other room to discuss possible scenarios for the idea of plastic bags in trees etc. We both brain stormed ideas and began to fine tune some of the most favourite outcomes, as before we decided it would be good if we could make the film very comical and less serious, we had decided to have series of gags in a sequence.
As the process went on, we both planned our time using Google calendar, and documented our progress on blogger, day by day, so then we could be in front of the schedule as much as we could to be on top of things in order to sort out potential future problems.
Starting off in maya, we both had separate tasks, Kirill worked on the character models and rigging, whilst I worked on the street and objects and everything in the scene, including lighting, texture maps and bump maps as well. After this we both worked on the animation of the characters, initially I worked on the first character (has a recycle sign on his chest), I had to make a walk cycle for him and later I had to animate certain expressions, like taking a packet of chewing gum out of a bag, animating a run, jump and cower and other expressions. Also I modelled and animated the dog character, this involved walking, running then jumping, then running and falling over. The dog was a lot harder to do. A dog walk cycle is much different to a dog run cycle, unlike in humans, a run cycle is a heavily exaggerated walk cycle, so I had to get my research by filming footage of a running and a walking dog.
As the time was coming to synching all the animations together, I had to do a series of still render tests, which would establish the overall rendered look of the animated film. I had a lot of problems, rendering was taking a rather long time to complete, and on a preview setting and small image size. In the end the problem was solved through logging into the computer locally and because it did not have any problems connecting to the uni’s server, it did processes much more quicker and so the render took a tenth of the time. We had a couple of issues, which we sorted when it came to synching our animations together and all on the same scene file, which then reduces complications, when it comes to batch rendering. After our first batch rendering that we did, it was first in an SD, 720x480 wide screen format. This was for the final crit, and after the crit we got some feed back which involved improvements to our animations and small problems like re-editing of bump maps and some more careful sound design. As we had a week after the final crit to get everything polished, we decided to re-render in high definition 1280x720, which made it look a lot more sharp and an overall professional standard. As before Kirill worked on sound design and I worked on the compositing of all the elements, which took a lot longer than usual, because of the detail needed for the bag.
There is always the question, ‘if you had more time..’, well all projects need more and more time, but I feel that if we worked any more on it, it would have been a lot more messy, even though it would be nice if we could have ambient occlusions rendered out, to give that more realistic lighting look.
On the whole, I am very happy with the overall look to our animated short that we have produced, I feel that we have both worked to a very professional standard and overall I could not be happier with our final piece.